HOW TO make State agencies and public bodies more effective and more accountable is one of many challenges facing the Government. For as the agencies increase in number and size, their accountability has declined. Fás provides the best and most graphic illustration of a failure of management and corporate governance.
There, serious mismanagement and huge overspending went undetected for too long and by too many: by Fás management, its board and the department. In a Private Members’ Bill last week, Fine Gael’s Leo Varadkar proposed major changes in how public bodies are governed and how they can be made more accountable to the Oireachtas. The Government has already announced a number of State agency rationalisation measures. And the McCarthy report has advanced that process further, with proposals that would achieve over €170 million in likely savings.
Fine Gael advocated three major changes: first, to rationalise and reduce the number of public bodies; second, to ensure the Oireachtas can scrutinise appointments to such bodies, and third, to make public bodies answerable to the Oireachtas. Certainly, the State can manage with fewer public agencies: far too many have poorly defined responsibilities while some merely duplicate the work of others.
A Minister’s right to make appointment to State boards has long been accepted as one of the perks of high political office and is seen a means of rewarding party supporters. Party allegiance alone should not debar anyone from selection, assuming those appointed have the experience and skills required for board membership. The Fine Gael Bill proposed that the names and qualifications of board appointees to public bodies should be laid before the Dáil. A nominee to the chair of a State board would face scrutiny by an Oireachtas committee and his appointment could be delayed if considered inappropriate. In addition, the Bill proposed to make State agencies and their chairpersons more accountable to the Oireachtas by giving other parliamentary committees scrutiny powers similar to those of the Public Accounts Committee.
The provisions of the Bill, although defeated in the Dáil, represent one part of overall Oireachtas reform. But first the Oireachtas must rationalise some of its own activities by reducing the number of Dáil committees from 23 to 15 as has been proposed though not yet implemented. With parliamentary committees, as with public bodies, less is more.